After steamrolling establishment-favored pols in a trio of recent Senate primaries, grassroots conservatives face a much steeper climb in a Central Florida congressional primary Tuesday.

Freshman Rep. Sandy Adams is the insurgents’ choice, backed by Sarah Palin, Rep. Allen West and a host of tea party groups. But she’s the decided underdog against veteran GOP Rep. John Mica, the powerful transportation committee chairman who embodies just about everything the tea party hates.

A 20-year Capitol Hill veteran, Mica has used his incumbency to great effect, reminding voters of his long record of service to the state and — more important — filling his campaign coffers with cash from industry groups who depend on his influential committee.

Through the end of last month, the 69-year-old Mica had outspent Adams more than three-to-one. In an acknowledgement of her campaign’s financial straits, she recently loaned her campaign $100,000 despite being one of the least wealthy members of Congress.

Reduced to running a campaign on the cheap, Adams has relied on a paid staff of just a handful of workers. She wasn’t able to open a campaign office until just a few weeks ago. And while Mica has aired a flight of slickly-produced TV ads, Adams has run just one.

Call it old-fashioned, but this is one race where the trappings of power may trump pitchforks. The member vs. member clash was triggered by a state redistricting process that placed the incumbents in the same district.

“There are many people who have told me they are supporting me but they can’t have their name show up on my contribution list for fear of what might happen, which is sad. I never thought I’d hear that in America,” said Adams, 55, a former police officer and state legislator who has a reputation for toughness after enduring an abusive early marriage and the death of her second husband.

“He’s used his position to raise a lot of special interest money, and he’s used that money to attack me with false ads,” she added of Mica.

Former GOP Rep. Lou Frey, who represented Central Florida in Congress during the 1970s, said Adams’s lack of cash has left her badly hamstrung. Convincing voters that an established, well-known lawmaker should be fired requires a sustained, well-funded assault, he said – something Adams couldn’t muster.

“If you don’t raise money, you’re at a disadvantage,” said Frey, who is neutral in the race.

So Adams is trying to press the advantage she does have — an activist base of supporters.

At a campaign rally for Adams in this Orlando suburb Monday, Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer rallied the congresswoman’s backers. Invoking the upset victory of Ted Cruz, a tea party-aligned Texas Republican, over a better-funded opponent in a recent Senate primary, Kremer said the boots-on-the ground energy of the conservative movement could overcome Mica’s financial dominance.

“From the beginning of this movement, I have heard continuously there is one congressman that we need to get rid of – and that is Congressman John Mica,” Kremer said. “Money doesn’t buy elections. We saw that last week in Texas, where Ted Cruz was outspent four-to-one. Yes guys, we can do this.”

Adams and her allies paint Mica as a free-spending creature of Washington who has lost touch with Floridians and run afoul of conservatives.

This week, Adams launched a TV ad tying Mica to President Barack Obama. It features footage of the president praising the chairman for his work on a just-signed $105 billion transportation bill. Her campaign is also handing out mock baseball cards depicting Mica as a “big spending Washington fat cat.” On the back of the cards are statistics showing the total number of earmarks Mica had secured over the last two decades.

Standing alongside Kremer, Adams summed up the central message of her assault on Mica.

“He has been here for 20 years and has become part of the problem, not part of the solution,” she said. “He may have had the right ideas 20 years ago when he came to Washington, but he’s become part of Washington.”

It’s a line of attack that’s similar to the one that Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, a tea party favorite, used with success in his spring primary against longtime Sen. Dick Lugar.

But Mica allies insist that unlike Lugar, who was widely regarded as detached from Indiana, the congressman has been a constant presence at ribbon cuttings and other Central Florida events.

“Mica has good leadership credentials,” said Dick Morris, the conservative pundit and longtime Mica friend who is informally advising the congressman. “The destruction of Lugar was due to his lack of nexus in the state,” he said. To the contrary, “that works in Mica’s favor.”

And as a single House member, even one with Palin’s imprimatur, Adams lacks the kind of profile that allowed statewide tea party candidates like Mourdock and Cruz to tap national conservative fundraising networks to build respectable campaign war chests.

Mica hasn’t needed those activist networks, instead turning to interests with a stake in his committee’s actions for campaign money. But Mica rejected the notion that he has gone Washington and insisted he wouldn’t meet the same fate as some other veteran lawmakers. He said he recognized the threat Adams posed to him early on and has taken the race seriously.

“We’ve come out pretty aggressively,” he said.

In a nod to the power of the tea party, Mica highlights his conservative credentials on the campaign trail. At a Rotary Club breakfast in Oviedo Wednesday, the congressman outlined what he’s done as House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman to cut the national debt, such as his recent effort to highlight cost-saving measures for Amtrak. He calls the tea party’s attacks on his record on federal spending unfair.

But while it’s out of fashion for members of Congress to point out how their skills as legislators have delivered any project that a future opponent might call pork, Mica occasionally grants himself that concession. The many federal projects he’s secured for Central Florida have been valuable for the state, he says. Adams, by contrast, is unaccomplished, the congressman argues.

To some, that Mica has taken on a fiscal-focused message — a hallmark of the tea party set that he now finds himself running against — is proof that he’s worried about his primary.

“By the traditional perspective, it is Mica’s to lose. But we are living in a different time. There is a significant ‘Throw the rascals out’ sentiment out there,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “That’s Mica’s potential downfall.”

“Mica should defeat Adams two-to-one,” he added. “If she comes close or wins, it should scare members of Congress, or ought to.”